Reddit CEO says facial verification may be introduced. Ostensibly to prevent bots.
But we all know how dangerous this can be. But most likely Reddit users will just accept it.
Although they have a great free analogue right under their noses - Lemmy. Which is many times better than its competitor.
I wish more people would discover Lemmy, but that’s unlikely.


Think of it this way: there are billions of types of online interactions where detection is either impossible (an image or link post) or extremely difficult (general conversation where sometimes even humans don’t sound like humans due to slang/education/etc).
Not only that, you’d end up with a “tug of war” where the existence of such detectors would power the improvement of the bots, which would require the improvement of the detector (which is always more difficult).
And the other option is an anonymous token that defines you as a human user. Which is simpler and cheaper to implement?
I think you’re wrong. Completely wrong. There are billions of messages but any intelligent person knows you don’t go through each one by one.
Do you ever see those guys who can look at a picture of a tree in a field and identify where it is in the world. There’s billions of trees. How do they do that with precision?
Classification.
They can train their bots on whatever they want. The human is smarter. If they tune them, you use the methods and knowledge learned and adapt. Like generating random numbers, there’s limits almost always. You don’t find them by inaction.
4chan a website full of racist, neo nazi and pedophiles were just goofing around and they do insane OSNIT research. Lemmy is fucking around with beans and moths. I don’t know. I’m just saddened by the state of things and how much better everybody else is at things I always thought the left was good at. It’s just been eye opening to see.
“the left” is not a monolith. A lot of people have various relationships with"the left". I don’t identify with “the left” much because I disagree, strongly, with being put in a groupthink box. I happen to have some beliefs that the groupthink box on the left has vhemently and painfully attacked me for. But I also REALL REALLY REALLY think the right is wildly wrong, because they’re being simplistic, stupid, and very very corrupt. And I STRONGLY object to corruption. I happen to genuinely and unironically love my country and the promise of a fair chance for all. I love clean water. Clean air. A healthy wilderness ecosystem you can spend time in. Hard work that does good for the world. I love the freedom to research, honestly, and speak freely and without fear.
I don’t see the right sharing some key parts of those values these days. But I’m concerned the left has become too inactive, too sullen, too much a party of victims who lash out reactively.
Don’t have a solution yet except to vote.
So, you want to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators? The human is smarter, yeah, but not the bot doing the detection.
You say it like “tuning them” is a magic trick, where they wave their hands a couple of times, and now the detection algorithms are smarter than the bots writing the comments. SOMEONE has to go in, and figure out the maths to make the detection algorithms smarter and better at detecting. That takes time and resources.
You’re also forgetting that “tuning them” works both ways. The people writing the shit-post bots also work on improving their tools, to make them indistinguishable from human posts.
Also: how can you tall that “lol, kys noob” is written by a human, or by a bot? The vast majority of comments online are these short shit-comments.